Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Isn't a PA supposed to save work?

I've realised I have no choice. I have too much paperwork to handle on my own. I've known for a while this was coming. My desk is constantly covered in paper which needs attention and do you think I can find the bits I am looking for? How about get the desk clear to design patterns or work on the book? No not a chance. So after getting multiple offeres of help in a week I took the hint. I am now looking forward to a less cluttered desk (and full of much more interesting clutter I hope). However to get to this point I've got to do rather a lot of planning. You see all the questions I answer regularly now have to be written down and the correct answers recorded. All the files I use need to be shared somehow and kept up to date. Email, phones calls and letters need moving around. It seemed simple until I really looked at the problem, now it just keeps growing. Fortunately I did have one offer of help from someone I see regularly so tranfering paper is fairly simple, but data and knowledge are another matter. It's one of those scary and yet exciting projects.

Whilst I haven't been doing as much writing as I would have liked recently I do have several patterns in various stages of completion now. I am also making painfully slow progress on my book on art quilts. It is going to cover a lot of the different techniques I use when making my art quilts. I am also writing up severl step by step projects for it as well. So hopefully it will be simple enough for anyone to produce a work of art but also provide some useful tools for more experienced quilters. Who knows it might just work. Oh and yes I will be getting lots of pictures of my art quilts to go in it too. Hopefully once I shift the more mundane work I will be able to make more progress on this.

My secrect squirel project for the Festival of Quilts hasn't made much tangible progress this week, but I did meet a lady who helped me with a concern I had. I just happened to be teaching next to exactly the expert I needed at the weekend. How cool is that? I found out that my quick and dirty solution really won't work, which to be honest I had guessed. However the slightly longer and only grubby solution will. That means I have a firm plan for at least one part of the project. It may not sound like much but I feel a lot better for it.

I suppose I had better get back to sorting and packing paperwork. Dull dull dull. On the other hand it is saving me from a quilt which doesn't want to play nice, so I should be grateful really. Hmm, and sorry if this post is full of spelling errors, the new blogger editor doesn't seem to have a spell checker.

1 comment:

Trudi said...

Get the right person for the PA job and you'll be free to be creative, confident they are dealing with the less creative effectively. It won't take them long to work it all out. Good luck!